Business Continuity Planning (BCP)

BCP Objectives

The purpose of the Business Continuity Plan is to provide us with a structure to support our reaction to a set of extraordinary circumstances that impact our ability to conduct business as normal. Our goal is to set priorities and identify resources to facilitate an effective response to an emergency; we cannot plan for all eventualities or seek to deliver a totally seamless service across all areas of our business. The approach that we have adopted seeks to combine the dual goals of meeting our legal and regulatory obligations and delivering good outcomes for our clients. Throughout developing and testing our BCP, maintaining good levels of service for all our clients is at the heart of our plan.

BCP Policy 

The BCP will be invoked when an emergency occurs impacting our employees, systems or office. The plan will only be used when the BCP Committee believe that there is a significant risk that we will be unable to fulfil some aspect of our key business obligations without a change from our normal strategy. Involving all departments at CAM and leveraging IT resources as necessary, the BCP is flexible and focuses on prioritising key tasks from a client and regulatory perspective. Whilst it is impossible to envisage every scenario in which the BCP may be required, BCP procedures is regularly updated and tested, and all staff are fully aware of their role in the event of an invocation. It is acknowledged that the new hybrid working model has significantly changed the concept of a BCP event and the current BCP takes into consideration the working practices that we have adopted post March 2020. The BCP Committee will provide an annual report to the Executive Committee summarising both the testing conducted over the preceding year and the state of preparedness that the Committee believes we currently achieve.

Enabling clients in need of funds to receive payments is the number one priority and resources are targeted to ensure that we can achieve this goal.

BCP Situations

We anticipate invoking our BCP if a disaster occurred at our Bishopsgate offices, which prevented us from having access to the building and damaged servers and other hardware. The BCP might also be used if a major systems outage occurred, impacting our ability to use our IT resources. A severe shortage of staff due to, for example, a pandemic, might also lead us to move to a BCP scenario. More usual disruption, such as strikes affecting public transport, a brief loss of core services at the office or temporary issues with remote access, would not cause us to implement our BCP. We work closely with our custodians and administrators, PSL, to ensure that their BCP is also highly robust and effective to support us in these situations.